My Antonia. Willa Cather. originally published in 1918. This review is based on the Sentry Edition published in 1954 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. With First Edition Illustrations by W.T. Bends. 372 pp.

The third of the Prairie Trilogy, My Antonia, was published in 1918. Willa Cather has been quoted as considering this as her best book. For me, it’s so hard, too hard to choose one among her so many exceptional novels.

This is another pioneer story. This time the focus is on a Bohemian immigrant family making their way pioneering on the Great Plains, as told to an “I” character (unnamed) by Jim Burden, mutual friend to “I” and Antonia Shimerda, the oldest girl in the large family, favorite of her sensitive musician father, and Jim’s best friend on the Nebraska prairie.

Original illustration“the Shimerdas”by W.T. Bends

In the course of the book we meet the rest of the Shimeras, Jim’s grandparents Burden, to whom he has come to live from Virginia after his parents’ deaths, their hired hands Otto and Jake, and other neighbors who live around their homestead outside Black Hawk, the closest “big” town. As time passes, youth grow to maturity, the pioneers go from sod cave houses to two story farmsteads and the land changes from tall red grass prairies to tamed and ploughed fields of corn and wheat.

Time is measured by the seasons and the land and most of the families settle into and come to love their new homelands. But not all. There are hard times, particularly for the Bohemian Shimerdas, but also for others as they learn new ways.

Christmasby W.T. Bends

We follow Jim on to University in Lincoln where he loses touch with Antonia—an innocent childhood romance perhaps realized in retrospect as love?—but reconnects with other hometown immigrant friends including Lena Lingard, who twenty years later insists he re-connect with Antonia who has married and has a flock of kids. His story concludes with that visit and the anticipation of more to come, as he returns to New York where he has become a thriving lawyer.

My Antonia is mostly a quiet story and Cather introduces us subtly and gracefully to the many facets of the human character. The writing is crystalline and spare. An immediately engrossing tale pulls the reader in without any of the silly modern “grabber” gimmicks of murder, mayhem or mysterious prologues that elude to the future or the past. But Cather never needs clever devices to immediately capture readers, carrying them along on a seemingly effortless trajectory from beginning to end. Nothing is superfluous, no character unnecessary. Cather’s novel is a magical creation. She provides one of those rare aha! reading experiences that remind us what great writing really is.

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but material out of which countries are made….Between that earth and that sky I felt erased. blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: Here, I felt, what would be would be.”

A combination of health and heat has greatly limited travel opportunities this year. So I’ve chosen to leave the highway to pursue another route—armchair travel, aka traveling at home.

Whenever I let my reading wander I find myself in places I didn’t know existed. A recent trip to the library got me started along the Oregon Trail. First with Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, his twenty-first century re-creation of an 1800s odyssey along the Trail using old style mules pulling a covered wagon. (See 8/30/15 post). Following that, was a review of the original book titled The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman written in 1849. (See 9/6/15 post.)

These books helped me throw my net a little wider by expanding “the west” that I wander to include the pioneer states of the 1800s, especially Nebraska and Kansas, in their early days as “western” as definitions went. Heck, I may even throw in Missouri, my state of birth, and original jumping off place for those heading out to “see the elephant”, the then unknown American West.

The stories of the prairie, homesteading, success, and failure on the western Great Plains are full of humanity, understatement, and hardship. Who better to take off to “see the elephant” with than one of its earliest champions and one of the very finest of American authors, Willa Cather.

Her gravestone reads:
WILLA CATHER
December 7, 1873–April 24, 1947
THE TRUTH AND CHARITY OF HER GREAT
SPIRIT WILL LIVE ON IN THE WORK
WHICH IS HER ENDURING GIFT TO HER
COUNTRY AND ALL ITS PEOPLE.
“. . . that is happiness; to be dissolved
into something complete and great.”
From My Antonia

Coming next, reviews of her prairie trilogy: O’ Pioneers, Song of the Lark, and My Antonia.